Amazon Q
AWS's generative AI assistant family — Q Developer for coding and AWS tasks, Q Business for company knowledge.
Verified against AWS documentation · 2026-08-27
Key facts
- 01Two products, one name: Q Developer (code, IDE, console, CLI) and Q Business (answers from your company's docs and apps)
- 02Q Developer lives where you work — IDE, AWS Console, CLI — and is trained on AWS itself, so it can explain console errors and generate IaC
- 03Q Business connects to enterprise data sources (S3, SharePoint, Salesforce, 40+ connectors) and answers with citations, respecting user permissions
- 04Ready-made assistant, zero ML skills needed — you don't pick models, train anything, or manage infrastructure
Exam triggers
Phrases and scenarios that point here.
- "AI assistant for developers", "code suggestions", "explain this error in the console" → Q Developer
- "Employees ask questions about internal company documents" → Q Business
- "Generative AI" + "no ML expertise required" + "assistant" → Amazon Q, not SageMaker
- Upgrade/migrate legacy Java code automatically → Q Developer code transformation
Not this service
- Build your own generative AI app with model choice → Bedrock
- Enterprise search without the conversational assistant → Kendra
Use cases
- 01A junior engineer pastes a CloudFormation stack failure into the console chat and gets the actual cause instead of an hour on Stack Overflow
- 02Modernizing a decade-old Java 8 order-management app to Java 17 — the transformation agent does the mechanical upgrade work
- 03HR team asks 'what's the parental leave policy in Malaysia?' and Q Business answers from the policy PDFs in SharePoint, with the source linked
- 04Generating a first-draft Lambda function with correct SDK parameter formats, because Q is tuned specifically on AWS APIs
- 05Security scanning code as it's written, catching hardcoded credentials before they hit the repo
How it's charged
- 01Per-user subscription, not per-request — Q Developer Pro is a flat monthly seat price
- 02Q Developer has a perpetual free tier with monthly caps (agentic requests, code transformation lines); Pro raises limits and adds IP indemnity + admin controls
- 03Code transformation is metered: Pro includes a pooled monthly line-of-code allowance per account, overage billed per line
- 04Q Business is priced per user per month, with a cheaper Lite tier and a full Pro tier
- 05No infrastructure to pay for — unlike Bedrock, you never see per-token or provisioned-throughput charges
